Overreacting 

Overreacting 

When everything inside is telling you to stay away from that person, place or situation. When you go into high alert. When your heart rate has raised and you may have sweaty palms and you feel tense.

This is a very natural and good response to threat and danger. We are meant to feel like this. Stress and anxiety are a normal part of life and we should welcome that.

However, when these responses come and our reactions seem a bit over the top this could be a triggering of emotional responses from the past.

We have an amazing inbuilt alarm system called the amygdala for danger and when our brain picks up similar patterns that remind us of the past, good or bad. We act appropriately according to what we have learnt so far.

So if we sense that something good is going to happen, we are picking up those signals through our senses and intuition and reading the situation. We may start to get excited, expectant your mood may lift looking for that something good to going happen. These messages in our brain get picked up in seconds before our conscious mind even becomes aware of them.

Take this as an example. You pick up a lead for your dog. He immediately thinks he is going for a walk. Bonus (He thinks). He starts leaping up and down, spins around, makes excited noises in the expectation that he is going for a walk. But you might be just picking up the lead to tidy up.

But if you are with a dog that is not yours and you pick up the lead that has been used to beat the dog he runs away, slinks down and whimpers.

The lead is the trigger. The lead is not good or bad but can be perceived as good or bad.

All of us have these triggers in our life and they affect us in different ways depending on our experiences. Some don't bother us too much and they don't make much difference but some can be quite debilitating and sometimes immobilising.  

Once realising we realise our triggers and how we act and react to things that we know are OTT reactions. Then we can work out the root cause and work on how to change that so it is not such a huge problem.